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Monthly Archives: October 2015

If you are a video algorithm engineer, it’s likely that you spent years at university studying something abstruse in mathematics or particle physics. Or, perhaps, visual/mechanical reproduction systems.

When you take a commercial job working for a video encoding company, I enjoy reading your patent applications. I like seeing your standards-body submissions. It’s great seeing your names in the minutes-of-meeting for boards and committees. Sometimes, I get to meet you and shake your hand.

It’s even better when your submissions for a new video codec are not only accepted, but when they are endorsed and your peers start using the reference encoder components, the reference decoders, and when everyone uses the same videos to test compliance.

What’s hard is that this all takes years. Years! IBCs and NABs come and go, MPEG committees meet and disband, and time passes.

The result?

A provable, reference, standard for interoperability. And/or a set of parameters that others can go and innovate with. Products, systems, and even optimised circuits that map your math into personal enjoyment.

Codec is a portmanteau of coder-decoder or, less commonly, compressor-decompressor.

[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec ]

What hurts you, and the industry, is if someone decides there’s “a breakthrough” that is possibly based on a story.

Investors who believed him ended up $27 million poorer. Despite the huge loss and the failure of the technology to work, no one has ever been prosecuted.

The Adams Platform technology could compress video by a ratio of a thousand to one, Mr Clark said. It could transmit full-screen, broadcast quality video over a standard phone line, he said. It couldn’t.

The claims seemed even more outrageous in the early 2000s, when broadband internet had yet to become the commonplace it is today. The potential seemed unlimited, and Mr Clark excited a huge amount of interest as well as a fair amount of scepticism.

It all amounted to nothing, and the company he floated on the ASX to exploit Adams Platform quickly folded after admitting there was no evidence the technology worked.

And like many others.

Now, if an amateur can download MediaInfo and look at a sample file that has been apparently encoded by a new codec, yet get all the encode parameters from the known codec x264: